Will Elon Musk disrupt government, enrich himself by it, or both?
In his election-night victory speech at Mar-a-Largo, President-elect Donald Trump heaped praise on a supporter he called a “super genius” and a “special guy.”
“We have a new star,” Mr. Trump announced. “Elon.”
Elon Musk, the multi-billionaire owner of SpaceX, Tesla, X (formerly Twitter), and other tech companies, is no ordinary Trump backer. In the campaign’s closing weeks, Mr. Musk organized and bankrolled a get-out-the-vote operation for Mr. Trump and bombarded X users with pro-Trump content. He bestowed $1 million a day on individual swing-state voters who signed a petition supporting free speech and the right to bear arms.
Why We Wrote This
The richest person in the world is taking aim at the federal bureaucracy, looking to cut waste and reduce regulations. Will Musk bring real change or just a slew of conflicts of interest?
As Mr. Trump noted, Mr. Musk also brought his own brand of quirky star power, appearing on stage at rallies, providing a partial counterbalance to the flood of celebrity endorsements for Vice President Kamala Harris.
“To a lot of people, that’s Tony Stark,” Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, a Democrat, told The New York Times last month, referring to the Marvel superhero. “That’s the world’s richest guy … and he’s saying, ‘Hey, that’s my guy for president.’” (Mr. Musk, in fact, had a brief cameo in Iron Man II.)
Now, Mr. Trump is tapping Mr. Musk to take a sledgehammer to the federal bureaucracy. On Tuesday evening, the president-elect announced that the entrepreneur, along with former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, would lead a new Department of Government Efficiency, driving “large-scale structural reform” from “outside of Government.” Mr. Trump called it “The ‘Manhattan Project’ of our time.”
It’s a role Mr. Musk seems eager to take on, saying he wants to cut $2 trillion in spending and that it’s time for “America’s A team” to reform the government. Mr. Musk has also vowed to keep funding pro-Trump candidates through his political action committee, which spent at least $130 million in 2024.
Beyond that new role, Mr. Musk appears to be influencing a wide range of issues. He has been seen at Mar-a-Lago nearly every day since Mr. Trump’s victory, weighing in on staffing decisions and other matters, according to CNN. Last week, Mr. Musk reportedly joined a phone call between Mr. Trump and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose military depends on the Starlink internet service provided by Mr. Musk’s SpaceX satellites. By some reports he has also proposed that Mr. Trump appoint SpaceX executives to the Department of Defense.
The overlap between Mr. Trump’s governing agenda and Mr. Musk’s business interests is raising concerns among some, given that SpaceX is a major contractor to NASA, the Department of Defense, and other security agencies. Before the Nov. 5 election, Mr. Musk wrote on X that “I have never asked @realDonaldTrump for any favors, nor has he offered me any.”
But Mr. Musk has repeatedly complained of “irrational regulations” that hold back innovation at his companies. Tesla is the subject of federal investigations into the safety of its self-driving technology. More broadly, the close embrace by Mr. Trump, a master of transactional politics, of the world’s richest man marks a new chapter in a modern era of billionaire-funded candidates pushing ethical boundaries.
“Musk and his businesses are going to reap extensive economic benefits from Trump’s presidency,” says Bruce Schulman, a political historian at Boston University. “I think Musk is going to receive favorable treatment from the federal government in regulatory matters.”
Musk: An unconventional innovation driver
Mr. Musk’s risk-taking, no-limits approach to building successful companies – he camps out in his factories to ensure production hits targets – makes him stand out, even among the alpha males of Silicon Valley who jostle for visionary status. Even critics concede his refusal to heed conventional wisdom makes him a potential disruptor to a federal government that has sprawled in scale and complexity under successive presidents.
Born in South Africa, he made his first fortune more than two decades ago at PayPal, whose cofounders included Peter Thiel, who first backed Trump in 2016. After PayPal, Mr. Musk directed his energies toward Tesla, whose electric cars would become popular, especially among liberals concerned about climate change. In 2009, the company received a $465 million loan from the Obama administration to build its first factory in California, a loan it repaid in three years with interest. It now has plants in Texas, Germany, and China and is valued at more than $1 trillion. After Mr. Trump’s victory, Tesla shares rose by 39%, boosting Mr. Musk’s net wealth to around $320 billion.
Analysts say Mr. Musk’s space rockets and satellites have succeeded as a result of innovation, private investment, and relentless experimentation, disrupting a defense industry that enjoyed cozy relations with federal agencies but has fallen behind its upstart competitor.
A decade ago, defense executives “looked at SpaceX and Elon Musk kind of mockingly,” says Todd Harrison, an expert on defense budgeting at the American Enterprise Institute. “Today, the same defense companies look at SpaceX with grudging respect.” Mr. Musk’s company has “done some pretty incredible things,” he says, and “defense executives would privately acknowledge that SpaceX is beating them, and beating them badly.”
Today, NASA relies on SpaceX to transport astronauts and equipment to the International Space Station. Mr. Musk’s company also has contracts with the Department of Defense to launch satellites for military communications and intelligence collection, a business that has expanded under President Joe Biden, despite Mr. Musk’s often frosty relations with the current administration. (Mr. Musk has also drawn attention for his regular contacts with Russian President Vladimir Putin, before and during the election campaign.)
These deepening ties speak to SpaceX’s competitive advantage in a time of increasing military competition in space, says David Burbach, an associate professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. But that same advantage – providing a service that other defense companies can’t match – makes SpaceX a larger-than-life partner for the Pentagon.
“I think even the Biden administration feels that SpaceX has been so important and is providing such leap-ahead technology that, I think, the administration has been willing to give Musk a pass where they might not in some other situations,” he says.
Of course, defense companies have long lobbied lawmakers and executives to look favorably on their businesses and the federal contracts that sustain them. But their political donations and support are typically spread across the aisle and conducted quietly behind the scenes, says Professor Burbach, who clarified these as his personal views.
“You don’t see the CEO of Boeing literally jumping up and down with the candidate at a rally, whether it be a Democrat or a Republican,” he says. “You know, maybe in a sense, it’s a little more honest and open with Musk.”
Conflict of interest, and the precedent of Andrew Mellon
Mr. Musk is unlikely to seek any Cabinet role requiring him to step back from running his companies and possibly divest his holdings. If he did that, the closest historical analog might be Andrew Mellon, the banking and steel tycoon who served as Treasury Secretary under three Republican presidents in the 1920s and ’30s.
“He was one of the richest and most prominent businessmen in the country. And he really did define the nature of governance for that whole decade,” says Professor Schulman.
President Harding praised Mr. Mellon as the “ubiquitous financier of the universe,” after he poured money into the president’s 1920 campaign. Mr. Mellon’s promise to hand off his companies while serving in government proved empty. He controlled a monopoly on aluminum supplied to a growing aerospace sector, and he shaped tax policies that swelled his personal fortune. His reputation later cratered in the Great Depression after lawmakers in Congress exposed his self-dealing.
By tapping Mr. Musk to remake the federal bureaucracy, Mr. Trump is also, in some ways, following in the footsteps of leaders like President Bill Clinton, who in 1993 put Vice President Al Gore in charge of a National Performance Review. The effort spanned Mr. Clinton’s two terms and led to a reduction in the federal workforce and of internal regulations.
But reformers usually speak about improving public administration, says William Howell, a politics professor at the University of Chicago who directs its Center for Effective Government. What’s different about the incoming administration is that “it employs the language of laying waste to an administrative state that it finds corrupt and noxious.”
Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk “gesture towards efficiency,” he says. But their real interest “is dramatically curtailing the reach of the administrative state and cutting regulations.”
Pushing innovation or routing regulations
Mr. Musk’s companies are the subject of multiple federal workplace and product safety investigations.
Last year, Reuters published an investigation into deaths and injuries at SpaceX facilities that detailed a chaotic workplace where routine safety procedures were skipped to meet Mr. Musk’s deadlines for rocket launches. After Mr. Trump’s reelection, a former SpaceX official told Reuters that Mr. Musk “sees the Trump administration as the vehicle for getting rid of as many regulations as he can, so he can do whatever he wants, as fast as he wants.”
Jordan Barab, who served as deputy assistant secretary of labor under President Barack Obama, says Mr. Musk’s idea of making government more efficient will likely prove self-serving and hazardous, given his past defiance of health and safety standards, including at Tesla’s factory in California.
“He gives the impression that he thinks of himself as kind of a master of the universe, above all these pesky government regulators,” Mr. Barab says. “He puts the efficiency of his companies over the health and safety of his workers.”
Mr. Musk has denied that his companies provide an unsafe work environment. But he also voices frustration with regulations that he sees as unnecessary or ill-suited to technological innovation, particularly in the development and launching of SpaceX rockets. He has framed this tension as existential in the context of his stated goal of colonizing Mars.
“America is being smothered by ever larger mountains of irrational regulations from ever more new agencies that serve no purpose apart from the aggrandizement of bureaucrats,’’ he wrote on X. “Humanity, and life as we know it, are doomed to extinction without significant regulatory reform. We need to become a multiplanet civilization and a spacefaring species!”
How long Mr. Musk will stay focused on Mr. Trump’s efficiency agenda remains to be seen. Neither man seems prepared to dedicate themselves to making “thoroughgoing change in something as extensive and complicated as the federal bureaucracy,” says Professor Schulman. A more likely scenario, he believes, is the creation of a commission that gets a lot of attention and then quietly fades from view.
Podcaster Joe Rogan posed a similar question during an interview with Mr. Musk last month. “How are you going to have the time to oversee all this [expletive]?” Mr. Rogan asked. To which Mr. Musk replied: “I’m pretty good at improving efficiency.”
From Twitter to X, from the left to the right
In April 2022, Mr. Musk decided on an impulse to purchase Twitter for $44 billion amid rising controversy over its content-moderation policies that conservatives decried as censorship. At the time, he was among the platform’s most prominent users.
He discussed his acquisition that month over dinner with four of his sons, according to Walter Isaacson’s biography, published last year. Mr. Musk told them he wanted Twitter to be more of an inclusive public square, adding, “How else are we going to get Trump elected in 2024?”
“It was a joke,” wrote Mr Isaacson. “But with Musk, it was sometimes hard to tell, even for his kids. Maybe even for himself.”
Mr. Musk had previously described himself as socially liberal and said that he donated to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. As he told Mr. Rogan last month: “I was on the left until three years ago.”
His political journey to Mr. Trump’s side appears to have started during the COVID-19 pandemic when he chafed at public-health closures of Tesla’s factory in California. He also became a critic of what he calls the “woke mind virus” in society, particularly around gender identity. He has a transgender daughter, Vivian, who transitioned in 2020 at the age of 16. The two are estranged; Mr. Musk says he “lost” his son to gender surgery that he claims he was tricked into approving. In total, he has 11 children, born to three mothers.
Under his ownership, Twitter, which he renamed X, reinstated Mr. Trump’s account, which had been banned from the platform, as well as several right-wing firebrands. Critics say the platform has largely stopped policing misinformation.
Mr. Musk publicly declared his backing for Mr. Trump after the former president survived an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13. X leaned hard into the campaign, amplifying positive messages about Mr. Trump and other Republicans at the expense of Democrats, according to the Washington Post. Other research has found Mr. Musk’s own posts have also been boosted on X. Analysts say the increasingly right-wing tilt on X could also reflect the exodus of liberal users under Mr. Musk’s ownership.
Critics accuse Mr. Musk, who has over 200 million followers, of spreading false claims about election fraud and other Trump talking points. He repeatedly argued on X and elsewhere that Democrats were deliberately encouraging illegal immigration as part of a plot to boost their party’s prospects at the ballot box (only citizens can legally vote in federal elections). His claims that Democrats are “importing” migrants into swing states to engineer future majorities also echo the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory.
Mr. Trump owns his own digital platform, Truth Social, though his posts there were reposted on X during the campaign. That technically puts the two men in competition for social-media clicks, while Mr. Musk has ambitions for X to become a digital-payments platform.
Critics have pointed to X’s loss in advertising revenue and vertiginous drop in valuation since Mr. Musk took it private as an example of his Midas touch deserting him. But his vast wealth means that he can afford to subsidize X to sustain its political reach, just as media tycoons prop up loss-making news outlets that have influence over public life.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns a space company that competes with SpaceX for rocket launches. He also owns the Washington Post, which made him a target for Mr. Trump during his first term. The newspaper’s editorial board reacted furiously when he axed its planned endorsement of Vice President Harris, arguing that the Post should remain politically neutral. After Mr. Trump won a second term, Mr. Bezos publicly congratulated him on “an extraordinary political comeback” and wished him success in “leading and uniting” the country.
The message was posted on X.
